Can Corruption Be Studied in the Lab? Comparing a Field and a Lab Experiment

This paper makes an attempt at testing the external validity of corruption experiments by moving from the lab in a developed country, to where it matters the most, the …eld in a developing country. In our experiment a candidate proposes a bribe to a grader in order to obtain a better grade. We …nd the direction and the magnitude of most treatment e¤ects to be statistically indistinguishable between the lab and the …eld. In particular, increasing the graders’wage reduces in both environments the probability to accept the bribe. Finally, we identify several micro-determinants of corruption (age, religiousness, ability). Keywords : Corruption, Experimental Economics, Field Experiments. JEL Classi…cations : C91, C93, D73, I20. Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Université de Montréal, CIRANO, and CIREQ. yDépartement d’Economie, Université de Montréal, C.P. 6128, succursale Centre-ville, Montréal, QC, Canada, H3C 3J7. E-mail: [email protected]. We are very grateful to Omar Al-Ubaydli, Jim Engle-Warwick, Gérard Gaudet, Glenn Harrison, Julie Heroux, Abraham Hollander, John List, Claude Montmarquette, Soiliou Daw Namoro, and Clara Sheets. We also thank seminar and conference participants at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, SUNY Stony Brook, UC Santa Barbara, NYU, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the ESA 2007 meeting in Tucson, the CSAE conference 2008 in Oxford, the IMEBE 2008 in Alicante, the New Techniques in Development Workshop 2008 in Canberra, the CEA 2008 in Vancouver, and the SCSE 2008 in Montebello. We would like to thank the recruiting …rm Opty-RH for its help with hiring subjects in Burkina Faso. Finally, the authors gratefully acknowledge …nancing from the CRSH. As always, all remaining errors are ours.